My current project at work is rather large in scope: I’m creating a series of new ASP pages for professors so they can get a two-week demo without having to talk to a sales rep beforehand. I ended up creating four pages for the job, including one that is entirely in VBScript, run at the server, which then dynamically creates the HTML page. In other words, all HTML is done with “response.write(“<B>Blah</b>”).”

I had an interesting discussion with Kevin Friday. Some dolt had given out the office username and password for the live site (both of which were “proftext”) and Kevin sent me an email about it, asking me to disable that user name and create a new one for office use. Later I was filling him in on the situation, explaining it was a fairly simple task but it took a little while longer because I had to look for some stuff in the code.

“Tell me this isn’t hard coded in,” he said, shaking his head.¹

“Well, yeah, it is,” I responded, somewhat hesitantly at first.

He went off on a little tangent about the stupidity of such coding practices, then paused to say, “I’m not criticizing you, of course — just giving some advice for the future. If DLI folds up and you end up slinging code somewhere else, don’t do that — it’s poor coding practice.”

“I honesty doubt that I’ll be doing this for any indefinite time,” I said. “I’m just learning all this stuff while I have the opportunity, but it’s not my first love. I just find — well, I wouldn’t say that I’m gifted at it, but I find that it’s very easy for me to understand. It’s very logical.” To which Kevin responded, somewhat surprisingly, “I think you’re fairly gifted at it.” A nice, affirming moment.

1 All of this, of course, is a very rough paraphrase of what we actually said to each other.